THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 1889

On Boxing Day, 1889 the Vancouver World started hyping a special edition it planned to put out New Year’s Eve. “Look out for it,” said a giant ad. “The special issue of the Vancouver World for December 31 will be the most complete newspaper publication which has yet appeared in Canada.”

A “bird’s eye view” map of New Westminster from a Dec., 1889 “holiday edition” of the Vancouver World is among the historic documents that used to belong to Francis Carter Cotton, the owner of Vancouver’s first newspaper, the News-Advertiser.Gerry Kahrmann / PNG

On Boxing Day, 1889 the Vancouver World started hyping a special edition it planned to put out New Year’s Eve.

“Look out for it,” said a giant ad. “The special issue of the Vancouver World for December 31 will be the most complete newspaper publication which has yet appeared in Canada.”

The 12-page special was to be crammed with information about Vancouver, New Westminster, its sister cities and even interior towns. It would be illustrated by “new engravings” of the city “expressly taken and engraved for the Holiday Edition of Vancouver’s Mammoth Journal at an enormous cost.”

It would also come with a Bird’s Eye View map of Vancouver, which purported to show every building on the city from a “bird’s eye view” in the sky.

“Those who have seen this work pronounce it the finest and best work which has yet appeared anywhere,” boasted the World.

The bird’s eye map was done by the Elliot Publishing Company of San Francisco, which did similar maps of cities up and down the west coast.

The Vancouver Archives has a copy, and it is an absolute killer. The city was only four years old at the time, and was still centred in Gastown. There was virtually nothing east of Campbell Avenue in Strathcona or south of False Creek, and most of the West End was still vacant – the city pretty much ended at Broughton and south of Davie.

The shoreline also looked totally different, because the east end of False Creek extended up to Vernon Drive (a block off Clark). There was a bluff on the Coal Harbour shoreline between Howe and Bute where the early elite built the city’s first mansions (it was nicknamed Blueblood Alley).

The World published a second Bird’s Eye View for its holiday edition, of New Westminster. It is exceptionally rare, but a copy was recently unearthed in a cache of documents owned by a descendent of Francis Carter-Cotton, the owner of Vancouver’s other newspaper in 1889, the News-Advertiser.

Like the Vancouver map, it featured illustrations of individual homes or commercial buildings around the edges of the bird’s eye map. There were drawings of the Royal City Planing Mills, Kwong On Wo & Co.’s import store, and the elaborate mansion of T.J. Trapp, hardware merchant and auctioneer.

On page 11 of the special section there is another wild old map, a “Plan Shewing (the) Proposed Ocean Docks for Japan, China and Australasian Pacific Steamships (from) Vancouver, B.C.”

The docks were to be located in Kitsilano Point, where the Vancouver Maritime Museum is today. They were to be accessed by a swing bridge from the foot of Bute across False Creek.

The front page of the special section featured a list of Vancouver’s biggest taxpayers. The first name on the list was Lord Elphinstone, a Scottish lord who owned $15,000 worth of Vancouver real estate. But his holdings were dwarfed by Donald Smith and Richard Angus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose property was worth $1.7 million.

On page 5, the World published a “complete record of all buildings erected in the city since the Great Fire.” This is a bit of an overstatement – if you skim down the first column to Alexander Street, it says there are 44 separate buildings on Alexander Street, but only lists the street’s 23 “principal” buildings.

Still, the list is fascinating, because it shows private homes. Hastings Mill owner Richard Alexander, for example, lived on the street that bore his name. Ironically, his house wasn’t made of wood, it was “cement and brick in imitation stone.” It was valued at $7,000.

There were 80 buildings on Hastings Street, valued at $409,325, and 63 on Westminster (the original name of Main Street), valued at $111,520. There were a mere 29 buildings on Georgia, but they were valued at $411,000. Granville Street had 28 buildings, valued at $308,950.

The city’s population was estimated at 13,678, up from 600 when the city was incorporated in 1886.

“The progress made by Vancouver in the building line during 1889 has been truly phenomenal,” said the World. “This, the Empress City of the Northwest, only three-and-a half-years since its complete annihilation by the devouring element (i.e., the fire), can now boast of the finest buildings on the continent of America, and can compete successfully with any of its older, but not more go-ahead, rivals on the Pacific Coast.”

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